Robocorp Technologies Inc. is on a mission to bring robotic process automation to more enterprises after landing a $21 million early-stage round of funding.

Canvas Ventures led the Series A round, with participation from Benchmark Capital, Slow Ventures, Uncorrelated Ventures, Haystack Ventures, Artisanal Ventures, Firstminute Capital and a host of angel investors. It follows a $5.6 million seed funding round in November 2019.

Robocorp is one of several emerging startups in the RPA market that differentiates itself from more established firms with its open-source agenda. The company has built an open-source software stack with a number of tools that developers can use to design, orchestrate and then run robots directly from the cloud.

Those robots are used to observe workflows in business applications such as customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning tools, and then deduce ways to automate repetitive tasks within them. In a nutshell, they free up employees from doing lots of manual and mundane work, which means they have extra time to focus on more creative or demanding tasks.

Eliminating a few keystrokes might seem trivial, but the savings can be quite considerable when they’re applied to hundreds or thousands of users over long periods of time. As a result, RPA tools are in big demand. The only problem is that such tools have traditionally been very expensive, and that’s what Robocorp is trying to amend with its open-source take on RPA.

“The current model of proprietary tools requires businesses to choose from a preset list of possible automation, and our goal is to empower developers to build their own solutions and share those tools with the global developer community and RPA enthusiasts,” Robocorp co-founder and Chief Executive Antti Karjalainen told SiliconANGLE in an interview last year.

Robocorp’s RPA platform is built atop the open-source Robot Framework, which was originally developed as a software testing environment. Robocorp has taken that environment, merged it with the Python programming language and applied it to RPA.

Karjalainen said that leveraging the Robot Framework gives Robocorp a big advantage over other open-source RPA platforms such as Camunda Services GmbH and TagUI. “Because we are leveraging Robot Framework in our RPA stack, our ecosystem is much larger than with any other open-source platform out there,” he said.

The company reckons more than 5,000 developers are currently using its platform to build and manage lots of different open-source robots. As well as RPA, the platform also supports related areas such as digital process automation and intelligent automation.

Karjalainen explained that Robocorp essentially makes customizable RPA that’s affordable to companies of all sizes. He said one of its early users was a bank that automated a single customer service task using its open-source tools, and within one month it had saved customers a combined 1,400 hours of waiting time. “This bank would never have been able to justify implementing traditional RPA tools,” he said, citing their high cost.

Of course, Robocorp will need to get revenue from somewhere, and in today’s announcement it revealed how. The company is offering a paid cloud service that will reduce the complexity of using the open-source tools it offers. It will also throw in premium features that many enterprises want, such as security and identity and access management.

With the new offering enterprises will have two deployment options: Robocorp Cloud and the new Self-Managed Control Room, which is aimed at independent software vendors, robot-as-a-service partners and enterprise customers with enhanced data residency, governance and compliance requirements.

Looking ahead, Karjalainen told SiliconANGLE that Robocorp will use today’s funding to develop more enhanced features for the Control Room. At the top of the company’s wish list is a desire to add more powerful data processing and analytics capabilities, he said. The company also wants to create an improved experience for deploying and running the Self-Managed Control Room.

Aside from that, Robocorp is planning to grow its U.S.-based go-to-market team and invest in more customer success and technical personnel to support its growing network of global partners, Karjalainen said.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller said Robocorp will provide enterprises with more options for dealing with a very messy automation landscape. “Robocorp’s platform looks promising,” he added. “We will have to wait and see what Robocorp can do with this funding and see if it can make a difference for enterprises.”

Image: Robocorp